Route tracking of border crossing vehicles using inductance signatures of loop detectors

Monitoring border-crossing vehicles has been one of the focus areas of the Department of Homeland Security since its inception. The USA has a total of 7,514 land miles of borders with Canada and Mexico, and more than 140 million vehicles enter the US border every year. The vehicles then travel using a part of 4 million miles of available US public roads. Monitoring and tracking so many vehicles is a huge challenge and requires automated non-intrusive computerized technology. The paper proposes a new way of tracking vehicle routes through vehicle sensors that exist in the US transportation infrastructure. In most US highways and local roads, inductive loop detectors (ILDs) are embedded in the pavement to monitor traffic conditions, and the number of installations is constantly increasing. The paper introduces a method that utilizes the inductive signatures of vehicles generated by ILDs for vehicle identification and tracking. Signal processing techniques of inductance signatures and the experimental results on a highway data are presented.